Hey, Trump: If You Really Cared, You'd Welcome Syrian Refugees

The photos from Syria were stomach-turning and heart-wrenching: The bodies of children, arms splayed out, mouths hanging open, dead. A father clutching his two dead babies, both of them wrapped in white cloth, their skin tinted yellow and their eyes shut. According to the Turkish government, which oversees the hospitals where many of the victims were taken, this was the result of a chemical weapons attack using Sarin, a banned nerve agent that can leave those exposed to it dead or with permanent brain damage. According to the United States government, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who has relied on brutal acts of violence to maintain power in the face of a mass uprising to overthrow him, was to blame.

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In a head-spinning move, the U.S. launched missile strikes into a Syrian air base last night, on orders from President Donald Trump — the same Donald Trump who criticized former President Barack Obama for intervening in Syria and said it would be a mistake for the president to launch an attack without Congressional approval. His own attack, of course, was without Congressional approval.

According to Trump, he was pushed into action by the chemical attacks, which left scores of civilians dead and violated international norms against the use of chemical weapons. Obama had also said that chemical weapons were a "red line" that Assad couldn't cross without consequences, and then did little when Assad crossed it. Trump cited pictures of dead children as changing his attitude on Syria, saying the attack "crosses many, many lines." These were lines apparently not crossed by the last chemical attack, or by six years of stunning atrocities committed by Assad against his own people. Last year, defending his campaign promise to ban Syrian refugees — a promise he made good on in his first weeks in office — Trump bragged that when it came to grade-school-aged Syrian children, "I can look in their faces and say, 'You can't come.' I'll look them in the face."

I don't believe for a minute that Trump was sincerely moved by photos from Syria, given that he isn't moved by the plight of Syrian refugees and is now in the strange position of barring civilians from fleeing from the country he's bombing. But many of the rest of us were sickened by those images. It's almost impossible, unless you are uniquely hard-hearted, to have watched this six-year-long war unfold and to have observed its immense human cost, and not conclude that we have to do something.

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Even though every third person on Twitter is playing foreign policy expert today, it's been much more difficult for the real experts and policy-makers to articulate what that "something" should be — each move potentially sets off a chain of events that go from bad to worse. Embroiling ourselves in yet another ground war would be costly, strategically foolish, and probably impossible to carry out given our already stretched-thin military, and therefore seems mostly out of the question. Hillary Clinton recently suggested that the U.S. launch air strikes on Syrian air bases, which is what Trump did — but the risk of this particular administration is that it's led by a man with no coherent foreign policy vision whose first few months in office have been an exercise in chaos, someone who knows little and who has appointed only a small handful of people who know more. Under a more thoughtful and temperate president, we might look at these strikes as a necessary move to curtail the worst of Assad's abuses. Under this president, there's a real question of whether he's thinking six moves ahead (or even one, to the inevitable, and already building, Russian escalation).

The response from the American right is still unfolding. The hardcore America Firsters and alt-righters feel betrayed — using American military resources to defend a liberal human rights norm in a conflict in which the U.S. has no obvious interest is not the doctrine Trump promised his voters. But the more stalwart Republicans of the conservative foreign policy establishment are falling in line, already characterizing this attack as bold and necessary, with Trump Reaganesquely "reasserting American moral leadership." Trump, ever concerned about his image, is surely thrilled to see himself cast as a bold leader cut from Reagan's cloth.

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American moral leadership has certainly been in decline, at least over the past 67 days. And "America First" is the opposite of moral leadership — it's amoral narcissism, a small-minded view that's both impractical and dangerous in a deeply connected world, especially coming from one of the most influential and militarily powerful nations on the planet. It's a great campaign slogan, but when it hit up against blood-and-bones geopolitical realities, it didn't even last three months.

Now, everyone wants to know what's next. It was the litany of bad answers to that question that led Obama to not launch similar strikes in 2013, something many on his team, including Clinton, seem to think was a tactical error. The Obama doctrine of "don't screw stuff up" (to use the less profane version) was circumspect and cautious, and arguably cost innocent lives where the U.S. didn't step in; but by contrast, there is no Trump doctrine, just a kind of whack-a-mole response that seems more about the president's approval ratings than thoughtful strategy.

What Trump is offering is divorced from morality and instead tied to his own political future and his obsessive need for applause and approval. It's not America First; it's Trump First. This is, after all, the same president who happily rubs elbows with brutal dictators and habitual violators of human rights. Last week, he had Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on his couch, a man who has targeted journalists and political opponents, and who wasn't invited to the Obama White House because of his atrocious human rights record. Trump has repeatedly praised Vladimir Putin, Assad's major patron (along with Iran), and a man who oversees an oppressive regime where critics have a nasty habit of winding up dead. Every American president sometimes has to do business with unsavory characters, but Trump seems uniquely admiring of them.

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And Trump is also the man who barred refugees from Syria, the very country we are now bombing ostensibly to uphold the international norm against using chemical weapons, ostensibly because Trump saw a photo of dead and vulnerable Syrians. If America is going to show moral leadership, then let's show it — by opening our doors to those in need, not just dropping bombs.

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